Unlikely but access is only way to know more of President Obama’s faith

Whether it’s your friend down the street, relative you see at family gatherings or the U.S. president most of us see only on TV, one thing’s certain.

Access and time to observe first hand are the best mechanisms for understanding how and what people believe and worship.

And even then, it’s a moving target.

Religious affiliation is a difficult but often necessary label.

Difficult because beliefs often change over time and often hold with them charged histories. People change religions over time and also change subgroups within religions.

Yet, such labels are necessary. They help us relate to one another and make judgments regardless of whether we keep them private or public.

This recent poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life about President Obama’s faith affiliation has resurfaced a debate started soon after he emerged as a viable presidential candidate.

The poll’s main point is that more Americans think Obama is Muslim than Christian, the faith he’s maintained for a long time and defended again as his own by White House officials.

Here’s a blog by Time political/religion reporter Amy Sullivan on this topic. She follows Obama with an eye for religion and its impact. I agree with her particular point that Obama has made it hard to know a lot about his faith by not really revealing a whole lot about it on a personal level.

Here’s a Washington Post story about how Obama tends to keeps his faith private and how that impacts perceptions of him.

No doubt, the acrimony from the fallout with his former pastor play a role.

Still, his faith matters. Unlike your neighbor’s faith down the street, his faith has more consequences on policies that affect you.

As a religion reporter, religious affiliation is something that I and my fellow colleagues try to ascertain once we have the kind of access that allows us to listen, observe, and ask lots of questions.

And access is usually hard with high profile people unless they open the doors themselves.

We try to be as authoritative as possible after coming to a fact-based conclusion, but it’s a trying process.

What makes it hard too is that the criteria for religious affiliation changes from one faith to another.

What does it mean, for example, to say that you’re Catholic? Do you go to Mass once a week? Do you fulfill all the rituals? Are you Catholic but actually go more frequently to a Protestant church like a number in San Antonio do.

You could ask the same questions of Jews, Muslims and other faiths. And faith groups, themselves, have different standards for counting you among their own.

In Obama’s case, so much rancor is going on right now about his faith, I suspect the access needed to shed more light on it won’t be happening any time soon.